Articles Archive for June 2008

Opening a Thursday news conference, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger boasted that after just 18 months on the job, he had successfully fulfilled his three main campaign promises:
• Turning over control of the juvenile center to the chief judge;
• Giving the hospital system to an independent board;
• And creating an independent inspector general’s office.
Trouble is, Stroger didn’t make most of the promises.

U.S. consumer spending rose more than forecast in May as tax rebates drove the biggest gain in incomes in almost three years, enabling households to at least temporarily overcome soaring fuel bills.
The 0.8 percent rise in purchases was the biggest since November, as Americans bought furniture, clothes and electronics after filling their autos’ gas tanks, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Incomes grew 1.9 percent, the most since September 2005, and measures of inflation were lower than anticipated.

Fr. Michael Pfleger has reappeared on the national ABC program “Good Morning America” as some type of spokesman on race who is also against gun violence being touted as having “spent the last 30 years cleaning up his impoverished south side Chicago parish, fighting the presence of poverty, drugs, gangs and gun violence..” despite the dismal reality of the St. Sabina’s neighborhood floundering in a sea of prosperity in Chicago. Mixing partisan politics with religion has been combustible combination in Chicago for generations. The media practice of using a …

“For Obama, faith is not simply political garb, something a focus group told him he ought to try. Instead, religion to him is transforming, lifelong, and real.” That’s a quote from “The Faith of Barack Obama,” published by Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, scheduled to be released in early August by author Stephen Mansfield, an evangelical Christian biographer of New York Times bestseller, “The Faith of George Bush.”

Barack Obama’s name could have been invoked more at the corruption trial of his former fund-raiser Tony Rezko.
But it appears prosecutors opted against bringing Obama into the mix during the two-month trial.
Newly unsealed documents show that prosecutors sought to call witnesses to testify about Rezko’s ties to Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
Related Story
Obama says he avoided city, state corruption

From The Beachwood Coded Racism Affairs Desk
As Ben Joravsky noted recently at Clout City, one of the most familiar refrains from Mayor Daley’s enablers is that Chicago would have become Detroit if it hadn’t been for him. The good folks here at Beachwood Labs went to their computer banks to see if this was true and, indeed, this is the way life would be here if Daley had never become mayor.

Joined by leaders from the immigrant community, Aldermen George Cardenas of the 12th Ward and Manny Flores of the 1st Ward today introduced a resolution for the Chicago City Council that condemns the increasingly venomous tone of the national immigration debate and reaffirms the City’s support for sensible solution for the immigration issue.
“Throughout our history, Chicago has welcomed immigrants from around the world, including my own family,” said Alderman Cardenas at a City Hall press conference announcing the resolution. “Our city was built by immigrants, and has respected the contributions …

For a long time, the Supreme Court did its best to avoid the implications of the Second Amendment’s reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Its decision today is a constitutional landmark, a triumph for individual freedom and a tribute to the power of ideas.
The decision is the long-awaited result of an intellectual revolution in the legal academy. A generation ago, law professors generally regarded the idea of an individual right to own guns as a dangerous anachonrism.

Barack Obama, the US presidential candidate, has become embroiled in the long-running battle between the United Food & Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) and Tesco over union recognition.
Mr Obama has written to Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy urging him to engage with the union.
The letter is not the first time that the senator and Democratic nominee has raised the issue of union recognition at Fresh & Easy, Tesco’s US convenience chain. In November 2007 he wrote to Fresh & Easy chief executive Tim Mason.